Abstract
The paper presents a novel method for the extraction of facial features based on the Gabor-wavelet representation of face images and the kernel partial-least-squares discrimination (KPLSD) algorithm. The proposed feature-extraction method, called the Gabor-based kernel partial-least-squares discrimination (GKPLSD), is performed in two consecutive steps. In the first step a set of forty Gabor wavelets is used to extract discriminative and robust facial features, while in the second step the kernel partial-least-squares discrimination technique is used to reduce the dimensionality of the Gabor feature vector and to further enhance its discriminatory power. For optimal performance, the KPLSD-based transformation is implemented using the recently proposed fractional-power-polynomial models. The experimental results based on the XM2VTS and ORL databases show that the GKPLSD approach outperforms feature-extraction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) or generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) as well as combinations of these methods with Gabor representations of the face images. Furthermore, as the KPLSD algorithm is derived from the kernel partial-least-squares regression (KPLSR) model it does not suffer from the small-sample-size problem, which is regularly encountered in the field of face recognition.